On the situation
with Iraq, at this point, lining up behind the President with any kind of enthusiasm
is the worst kind of partisan bad faith, an abandonment of reason, ethics, and
pragmatism.

I can accept a
skeptic who wearily, resignedly argues that because the President represents
the United States and because hes committed us as he has in Iraq, we have
no choice but to look for the best possible long-term resolution of that commitment.
I can accept someone who reminds me that there were many people whose motives
for supporting the war before it began were well-intentioned, reasonable or
potentially legitimate. I continue to feel, as many do, that unseating Saddam
Hussein is something that anyone ought to recognize as a positive good. I can
even accept, as I noted some time ago on this blog,
that there are many within the Bush Administration who may have had good intentions
or reasonable opinions in promoting an attack on Iraq.

I am not prepared
to cut any slack to anyone who thinks that supporting the current policy as
it has been shaped by the President and his advisors is sensible, effective
or ethical. Im not interested in the outrageous hair-splitting and relativist,
deeply postmodernist nonsense being spewed out by many conservative commentators,
the knowing utterance of lies and half-truths, the evasions, the excuses, the
total disinterest in the hard questions that now confront us and the total inability
to concede even minimally that many of the critics of the attack on Iraq predicted
much of what has come to pass.

I continue to believe
that there is a sound argument for the judicious use of force in pursuit of
a legitimate war on terrorism. This is precisely why I feel such white-hot fury
at the current Administration. It is not merely that we were lied to, and not
only that the one thing I was prepared to concede to the Administration, that
the possession of weapons of mass destruction presented a legitimate casus belli,
turns out to have been the biggest and most aggressive lie atop a pile of misstatements
and deceptions.

What fills me with
loathing and anger is precisely my belief that there is a war
on terror, and that we are losing it . The President is the Commander-in-Chief,
but his battle plan stinks. Forget all the admittedly important talk about imperialism
or the morality of war or anything else for the moment. The first issue, before
we get to any of those debates, is that the top general has opened his central
front on a battlefield that favors his enemy, exposes his own troops,
and has no strategic value whatsoever, in service to a speculative, half-baked
geopolitical vision, a "democratic domino theory", which is crude
at best and quasi-psychotically delusional at worst.

The fundamental
strategic idea of the war in Iraq, when the dust of the initial campaign settled,
turned out to be a kind of 21st Century Maginot Line, plopping a bunch of US
troops down in an exposed situation and daring every possible organization and
group to take a shot at them, while also leaving endless space for geopolitical
end runs around the fortress. Worse, for the mission of reconstructing Iraq
to succeed, there is no way for the troops to hide or defend themselves fully
from attack. There are even some conservatives who have been brazen enough to
say that this is a really good idea, that US troops are flypaper
for terrorists. Who is the political constituency betraying our soldiers? Who
is failing to support U.S. servicemen? Anybody who calls
for them to be flypaper, to be meatshields, who asks them to
serve as impotent human targets, thats who. I don't think it's possible
to be more cynical than that, to be a more callous armchair general.

Ive seen
the press report on military families expressing support for their men and women
in harms way, and they should keep on doing that. Those families shouldnt
fool themselves, however. Those men and women, courageous and giving as they
are, are in almost all cases struggling mightily to make the best of a bad situation.
In many cases, considerable good is coming from their efforts. Iraq may yet
emerge as a freer, better, more hopeful society, and the Iraqis will be able
to thank the United States if that happens. But whatever is happening in Iraq
that is good, it is not a victory in the war on terror. Yes, Iraq
may come out of this better. It is hard to imagine that it could be much worse
than it was under Saddam Hussein.

However it comes
out, its final state will mean almost nothing in determining whether terrorism
becomes an even more potent global force: it will only determine whether one
nation and one people live better or worse than they did before 2003. In contrast,
the manner and style with which this war was prosecuted in the first place encouraged
and empowered terrorists, and the necessary long occupation that now must ensuefor
I acknowledge that we cant just pack up and leave, that milk is spilthas
given terrorists an easy target and enormous ideological capital all around
the world.

If you have a loved
one serving in Iraq, and you believe that we have to take the fight to terrorism,
then tell the President hes fighting in the wrong place and more importantly
in the wrong way. Tell him that his mistakes in pursuing this war have made
terrorism stronger. Dont let him use your loved ones as target practice
for terrorists, and don't let him misuse their sacrifices for narrow, selfish,
partisan gain. Ask him to use American military power where it needs to be used
in that struggle, and to forbear using it in ways that actively strengthen terrorists.

If you believe
instead that the war in Iraq is the first strike in a global war on tyranny,
then ask some tough questions of the President. Why is Iraq different than Liberia?
Or the Congo? Or North Korea? Or Saudi Arabia? And what happens after you unseat
the tyrants? Just how do you create liberal democracies using military troops?
If you have family in the US military, ask yourself whether your loved one has
been trained to be a civilian administrator, a mediator, a political scientist,
a lawmaker, a traffic cop, a speechmaker, or an anthropologist. Ask yourself
whether our fighting men and women have been given the tools or the practice
or even just the money and materiel to succeed in this mission, and whether
you support their enlistment in what is surely a war that will last decades
and cost many of their lives, the war against all tyranny everywhere. Ask yourself
if you hear even a peep from anyone in the Administration who seems to have
the slightest glimmer of a clue about how to create democracies abroad through
military occupation, or if any of the right-wing blowhards who have promoted
the war seem to either.

This is either
a war against terror, fought in the wrong place, in the wrong way, by the wrong
leadership, or it is a wider war against tyranny and for democracy, fought without
even the faintest clue of what to do next by a leadership that barely understands
or believes in democracy themselves. It is rapidly becoming an endless misadventure
whose only continuing justifications lie in the repeated errors of the people
in charge of it. They fail, and then use their failures to argue that those
failures are why they must be allowed to fail some more. Don't let them. We
cannot withdraw quickly or easily now, but we can ask that a failed leadership
shoulder the burden of their failures where it belongs, squarely on their own
backs rather than on the backs of U.S. soldiers.